The Advantage of Living With a Code

The CEO who built a $9-Billion dollar company from scratch gets fired from his own company for fraud.

A four-star general has an extramarital affair that jeopardizes official secrets and resigns in disgrace.

Men who should be the pillars of their community, role models, the men we look to for leadership, shatter the character and reputations that took them decades to build in one instant of mendacity & weakness.

Their weakness causes direct harm to others. Jobs are lost. Billions of dollars in value disappear overnight. Savings are destroyed. Trust in treasured institutions is eroded. People become cynical.

The Bushido Code (7 virtues) plus other excellent suggestions

This is what happens when men don’t live by a code.

Men need a code. Whether it’s the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Fierce Gentleman Manifesto, or the Bushido Code doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you, as a man, have consciously chosen a code, and do your best to live by it every single day.

In a harsher age, the code is instilled by parents or the community primarily so the individual and the community survives. As wealth made life easier, community disappeared, parents disappear, and so the code disappeared. “Do what thou wilt” becomes the whole of the law.

In this world there is sickness, hardship, suffering, darkness. The code brings us back from the brink of all this. It is the light we shine in the darkness. It is the flame that beats back the shade of corruption, scarcity, and ego. It is the pillar that holds us upright when we are most tempted to collapse under the weight of expediency, the lust for glory, the craving for approval.

Rebuilding our communities will take time. Making sure each child has parents will take time. In the meantime we must make an individual commitment to think deeply about our lives and our code.

Let’s take this very common moral code — “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” How many people work in industries that directly or indirectly contravene this code? Well, there goes the whole tobacco industry and the car industry. For sure you can’t work as a weapons manufacturer.

What about if you’re a marketing manager, and you are approached by a client who works in the tobacco industry or car industry? Do you take that client? A man living by a code that included “Thou Shalt Not Kill” would turn down that client.

This isn’t to induce guilt. I’m not saying we should become rigid automatons or Jain priests, who sweep the ground in front of them lest they step on an insect and kill it.

I’m saying we should consider the implications of our code on a global scale. We should acknowledge the madness that our current engineering of world systems has caused. I fly to Paris to have an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience with my family, and boom, via air pollution, I’ve contributing to the killing of beautiful creatures I love.

That is utter madness. Why is our world designed in such a mad way? Is our current design necessary? Is it optimum? Do we have a choice?

The answer is we didn’t pause to think about how we designed the world. We just took whatever came to hand and used it. We didn’t know any better.

But our current design is not necessary, it is not the only design, and now that we know it is directly contributing to a massive daily kill, we have the choice to change it. In fact, to not take that choice is morally indefensible. Changing the way our world works to reduce and eventually eliminate indiscriminate and ‘casual killing’ is the only moral choice.

Take cement. Cement outgases CO2 pollution that then causes heatwaves that kills people and reduces food production, which then also kills people. Cement is the primary ingredient in concrete, which is the 2nd most consumed substance on Earth, after water. Each person alive today “consumes” an average of 3 tons of concrete per year.

Basically the entire current global economic infrastructure is lethal to humans. To include in our code “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is to make a commitment to work towards a non-lethal world that works for everybody, as quickly as possible. Our task is simply to make obsolete the global economy as it is conceived today.

Most people at this point would throw up their hand and say “That’s impossible to live by the code.” Or, they’ll start modifying their code so it’s more convenient: “Thou Shalt Not Kill People You Work With Every Day.” Or “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Unless She’s Really Unhappy In Her Marriage And Hits On You After Three Martinis.”

But a convenient code is no code at all. Moral rules are not meant to be convenient, they are meant to guide us to optimum outcomes — for individuals and the community. If you only follow a moral code when it’s convenient or expedient, you might as well not have one.

That’s why we advance a code here at Fierce Gentleman. In surrendering to that which is larger and more powerful than us, we live in the power of those principles and lead upright, steadfast and moral lives.

This has nothing to do with religious affiliation, nothing to do with politics. These decisions about how we conduct our lives are moral decisions that every human must make. They are the ultimate statements of religion and politics and supersede labels and sects we may claim from ego. No man-made ego-driven political or religious sect lays claim to absolute moral integrity; it is always a question of individual behavior.